A Day in the Life of JonnyQ888

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Race to $200+/Day - Persistance

However you spell that word, I have it. I've been reading some blogs lately by people who are primarily PPC affiliates and it boggles the mind how much they make. Granted, they spend a lot to make that kind of money. I'm willing to do so - just looking at this month should be evidence of that.

I've spent more on ads this month than ever before. 4 figures worth and counting! Due to some miscalculations on my part and the use of some bad keywords, my spending has been far more than necessary. This has left me in the red so far this month.

Never fear! The fourth iteration of the campaign my affiliate manager recommended is starting to bear fruit and is in the black when you ignore the previous 3 attempts. I started work on a new campaign with a different affiliate network but have decided to hold off on doing any more. When I spoke to my affiliate manager there, he indicated that the offer was only doing 30 leads/wk for the top affiliate.

While that is around $600/wk, it is really not worth my time. If the top affiliate has been in that market and working it to the point of 30 leads/wk, then I'm probably unlikely to reach that level without significant work on my part. Why put in that level of work for $600/wk when I could work on an offer that could pull $600/day?

I've also started some small attempts as scaling the winners of some of my campaigns. I'm hoping this scaling action will at least double the income from my campaigns. How am I going about doing this? Basically, I am taking my winners (keywords producing conversions) and setting up campaigns with just those keyword in a different PPC network. Today was the first attempt so we will see how it goes.

Now I'm faced with a question - Do I continue to work on the campaigns I have or do I branch out to generate more income?

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Race to $200+/Day - Stumbling

Which is to be expected considering how new I am at this strategy. Even so, I know that I'm probably getting on my affiliate manager's nerves. I think I will be leaving him alone for a while as I try to get things rolling again.

What has happened since last time? Well my conversion rate on the affiliate manager recommended program went from decent for a start to abysmal. In an effort to raise my conversions, he recommended a similar program with a different landing page. From the surface, it appeared as though the second would be the better of the two. Nicer design. Cleaner layout. Clearer Pictures. It all seemed as though I would be well on my way to the $200/day mark.

After spending the hours to recreate the campaign and send traffic to the new offer, it only converted once in 826 clicks. Far from the advertised 4% that the merchant had claimed.

So, in a move that could either be viewed admirably determined or just plain as rash I have started to rebuild the original campaign from scratch. This time there will be new ads with stronger calls to action and, hopefully, better USPs. I have also ditched the tracking software thinking it may play a role in the lack of conversions as well as set up a domain for the offer.

I know this can work. I've seen far too many affiliates having $100k months for me not to be able to reach $200/day.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Race to $200+/Day - Bad Math vs. Good Math

I took an assessment of the current plan & here's how things are shaping up.

ClickBankCB1 - Near break even. Move on to making profitableCB2 - In progress (I'll get into this later.)CB3 - In progress

New Aff. NetworkA1 - In progressA2 - Cut for poor performanceA3 - In progress, on back burner

Yes, so as it stands I have 3 Clickbank products I'm testing and 2 from the new affiliate network. CB2 seems to hold a lot of promise. During the course of testing A1, I found that one keyword was bleeding the majority of my money with only 2 conversions. I looked into what the word meant and it wasn't anything related to the A1 offer.

Not even close!

So I cut it from the program last night. It was Bad Math and I wasn't going to have any of that. Well this morning I decided to do a little more research before work and found out that there was a Clickbank ebook on the subject. So I hastily threw together a campaign before work, knowing that I could generate plenty of traffic for the ebook. I came home today to find that it had converted! And it did so with only a $7 deficit.

That's Good Math for those who don't know. Especially considering that I put the campaign together in 15 minutes!

Now I am at the stage where I will make optimizing the current campaigns. I will not even look at a different offer until each of these is at a level that I think is acceptable.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Race to $200+/Day - Product 1 Established

With the latest sale of the Clickbank product I've been testing, I have reached the break even point. Now it is time to optimize the campaign and keywords. Unfortunately for me, my laziness kept me from setting things up properly for this campaign in the beginning. This means that I don't have data on the keywords that generated the sales.

A few moments ago, I finished setting up the ad/keyword tracking. Now I will be able to keep the winners and cut the losers during optimization. The goal is 100% ROI in the least. Looking at the traffic levels and the current conversion rate, it appears that this product could produce around $50/day with optimization of the campaign.

The other campaign my affiliate manager provided for me is producing leads but not at the rate I need. Considering that my ads are the only pre-sale available for the landing page, I think doing a better job with my ads will increase conversions.

Friday, May 09, 2008

Race to $200+/Day - HOLY COW!! Part Deux

Well, it's 6:30 in the morning and I am getting ready to go to work. I won't be doing this routine for much longer though. I am determined to make this Race work. Well yesterday turned out to be a better day for the business than I had imagined...

After posting HOLY COW!! part 1, I checked my phone to see if my girlfriend had called. She had but so had my affiliate manager. In his message, he said that he was looking over my stats and wanted to help develop some strategies to increase my conversions. Sweeet! We will be doing that later today.

But I checked Clickbank a few minutes ago and found that a product that I had started promoting last month had made a sale! I'm convinced now that this strategy will work. The only thing left is to make sure it works by August.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Race to $200+/Day - HOLY COW!!

I have to get back to work but I decided to check my stats while I was loading up some more ads. I know that I should be single-minded in accomplishing tasks but I just wanted to take a peek...

That peek said SALE!!!!

Well actually, it said LEAD!!!!

Either way the peek said it, it meant money=) Now, I have no doubt that I'm still in the red as far as this exploit goes but that lead is a step in the right direction. $21 gross - I'll need probably 15 of those leads/day to generate the $200+/day profit I need.

Race to $200+/Day

August is coming fast so my goal for May is to gross $2k. I say gross because I am just starting in this PPC game and I'm going to lose money before I make any. That's just how it works.

I've been tooling the campaign my manager has told me to work on and slowly Yahoo! has been approving my ads and keywords. I hate their system but I'm starting to generate traffic. I think that both my keywords and my ads have been better for this campaign than for any other so far since trying the direct to merchant method.

I need to keep it up. While he wants me to focus on one campaign at a time, I still feel I need to do at least 3/wk. While this isn't as fast as I had planned initially, I can see how the quality of my work is far better when I focus on a campaign, get it up and running, and then move to the next.

So far with Campaign R2-1 (Race to $200 #1), I have spent $30 and generated 96 clicks. With the new keywords I've been adding, I would like to get that into a couple hundred clicks per day.

Complete Para-Dig-'Em Shift----

This really is a paradigm shift for me. For a long time, I felt that doing this method meant spending too much money and not getting enough back. Not enough ROI. I have since shifted my perspective.

In those days, I was armed with a debit card. I only had the money in my account to cover my PPC expenses. That is why my attempt at the loan market back in the beginning of 2006 didn't work. I didn't have the funds to run with the big boys.

Now, armed with AMEX Gold Business, I have a nearly unlimited budget. I just have to make sure that I produce enough revenue to cover the costs. I'm better able to take risks now and you better believe I'm ready!

Friday, May 02, 2008

The Time is Drawing Near

Yes, August is almost upon us and things were looking bleak for executing my exit strategy. Things were looking incredible the first two months of the year but then it was as though March & April never existed. We are now into May and my business income is no where near what I need it to be for me to quit the jobbie job...

So I needed to change strategies...again. Creating products is too long of a process to achieve what I need. It was time to go back to my roots, back to affiliate marketing. I've signed up with a number of affiliate networks in hopes of reaching my goal using PPC.

Things were still looking bleak until I received a phone call the other day from an affiliate manager who worked for a network I didn't even remember signing up for. We talked and he seemed pretty gung-ho so I told him that I had some aggressive goals.

"I want to reach $200/day by August so I can quit my job and go full time into this business."

There was silence on the line.

Then he spoke, "$200/day is easy. We can get you there without too much trouble."

You can imagine how excited I was to hear that. We spoke some more and agreed to do weekly conference calls to go over offers, my progress, tracking data, etc. to make sure that I was on course. I emailed him later and thanked him for the call. He emailed back and said that we should increase the goal beyond $200/day. I would tell you what he suggested the goal should be but you wouldn't believe me anyway so we will just say $200+